The First Brit in Space and the Peculiar Doctor-Astronaut Relationship

I was driving home from work one evening, listening to the car radio as you do, just trying to find some decent music. I was pushing the button to let it dial in to the next station, whatever that would be, and after a few pushes I happened upon an advert. A radio advert for the job of being an astronaut.

It described how a new opportunity had been created. Britain as a country had a policy then of not funding human spaceflight, so a company had been set up to manage this mission. The government was supportive, but just didn't want to fund it. And as soon as an agreement had been made with the Soviet space agency that this was a mechanism for making it happen, the job advert was released — and I heard it on the radio. "Astronaut wanted, no experience necessary" was how it started. Then it went on to describe the opportunity, and the basic criteria they were looking for: a degree in science, engineering or medicine.

Somebody who still did a practical job with their hands, because manual dexterity to do experiments and operate the spacecraft was quite important. Somebody who already had some foreign languages, because all the training was going to be done in Russian — so we had to learn Russian pretty quickly. And just being physically fit. Four very basic criteria that many, many people would satisfy. But it goes to show, because astronaut training is quite specific, you just need somebody with that logical background — an understanding of a technical subject, and medicine was included in that. You just need the understanding, the logic, and then you can take on board all sorts of other new information, whatever that might be.

I initially thought, there's no way they're going to choose me, so what's the point of applying? I was driving home at that time, lots of stop-starts, and it gradually dawned on me that if I didn't have a go there was absolutely no chance — and this was just a fantastic opportunity. I was thinking, actually, not so much of the spaceflight, but of what the training would be like: the opportunity to go and live in Russia, to learn to speak a language fluently. I'd never had that opportunity before in my life. To be part of all the experiments, understand what was going on on the spacecraft, the technology. It was just a job with such variety — physical training as well. Where else do you have a job where you can combine all of those things?

So I thought, what did I have to lose? A bit of time making the application, and possibly some people might laugh at me. But apart from that, it was worth giving it a shot, because it would be such a great thing if I could get it.

It was very planned. The Soviet space agency had had a number of foreigners taking part in its space missions for a long time. In the 1980s they had this thing called the Intercosmos programme, where they'd train a succession of astronauts from communist-friendly countries — they had somebody from Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Cuba, and so on. So they had a lot of experience training people for very specific spaceflights. Not general career astronaut training, which is what NASA and the European and Russian space agencies do now, but a one-off mission where you know exactly what it's going to be about when you begin.

I was doing it with somebody else from the UK as well, called Timothy Mace. Tim was in the Army Air Corps and was selected to train with me. The idea is that one of us would be backup and one would actually fly. You don't know for most of the training who's going to be prime and who's going to be backup — the decision usually isn't made until a few weeks or a couple of months before the flight. So it was a bit like beginning on a conveyor belt and waiting to get spewed out at the end.

We started with Russian training and physical training. We had a timetable — it's like going back to college. We'd turn up for our lessons: theoretical lessons in ballistics and the theory of flight, lessons in astronomy in case we needed to do any astro-navigation. Then it got more practical and we'd learn about the technology of the spacecraft itself, and eventually go into the simulators. We did weightless training, which is the best — if you ever get the chance to do these parabolic flights where you get a few seconds of feeling weightless as the pilot lets the aircraft fall down one part of the parabola, it's the most amazing part of the training. Everybody looks forward to that. And emergency training too: what happens if we end up in the sea instead of on dry land, that sort of survival training. To answer your specific question about the intensity — at the time I didn't feel it was really intense, because it was all so planned and managed for me.

Oh yes. Everything was done in the Russian language — that's why we had three months of language training at the beginning. So language training and physical training, and then the lessons started. I wasn't fluent after three months, even though I was living there and not really hearing any English. But the lessons started out quite mathematical. If you think about astronomy, it's basically maths — a load of numbers and Greek letters — so I could get by with my limited Russian at that point. Ballistics is basically applied maths. I was very grateful for my maths background.

I learned a lot of these words first in Russian. I learned the concept in Russian, never having done astronaut training in English. Then I'd come back to Britain and be asked about these things in the media or in a talk, and I'd give direct translations of the Russian word. I remember talking about a fairing and calling it the "atmosphere shroud", and people looking at me thinking, what on earth is she on about? We call it the fairing in English — but I'd just directly translated it from the Russian. But by the time I'd finished my training I was pretty fluent, so better for that.

There isn't really any difference, to be quite honest. Technically, if you're an English speaker the word is astronaut, and if you're a Russian speaker the word is cosmonaut. The Americans in Cold War times kept to "astronaut" as a way of not having to use the word cosmonaut — it becomes a word that means us and them, so they could differentiate the Soviet cosmonauts from the American astronauts. To be quite honest, I trained as a cosmonaut, with cosmonauts, but the language of my country is English, so I've been called astronaut and cosmonaut — it doesn't really matter.

I was assigned a personal doctor — Tim Mace became backup and had the same personal doctor — who became a bit like a friend as well as somebody who generally looks after your well-being. He accompanied us on a lot of the training missions. He was there at the very beginning; on my first day of training he came to my flat to pick me up, and he'd advise me to wear a hat in this very cold Russian winter. "You must wear a hat" — shapku — he'd insist, it's imperative to have a hat. So he became much more than just a doctor. Recently I went back to Star City and met up with him for the first time in many years, and it was like meeting a dear old friend. Since then we've been determined to keep in email contact, which has been nice.

But there are other doctors, and we don't particularly like the doctors, I have to say. Astronauts don't like all the prodding and poking that goes on when we're getting checked out. And of course the doctors have always been all-powerful, because if they find something wrong with you that doesn't quite suit spaceflight, then you're kicked off your training. So going for a medical checkup as an astronaut is always a bit of a worry. It's said — I don't know how true it is, but I think it's true — that during the Apollo times the astronauts were made to wear rectal thermometers, because they were told it was important to have a very precise measurement of their internal body temperature. Whereas actually it was just a way of showing the astronauts that they didn't need to get too big for their boots — that in the end it would be the mission managers, and in particular the doctors, who were really in control of everything.

That's a good point. I'm sure there is — it's just that they're very good at finding out anyway. You can't really hide from a doctor with all the knowledge and understanding they have, as well as all the kit they can use to probe whatever orifice they might be probing at the time, and ultrasounds and scans for everything else. There's not really a lot of places to hide. But if we thought there was going to be a problem that might jeopardise the mission — no astronaut would want to fly into space to find they're jeopardising their own health, and the other astronauts might have to make an emergency return to Earth. So in that case there wouldn't be a temptation to hide. And the medical testing programme is such that I don't think there is a hiding place, to be quite honest.

We were selected partly on a psychological basis. The psychological testing for selection was really looking for people who — very much like the medical stuff — were very middle of the road, very normal. They don't want people who are particularly excitable or particularly depressive. They don't want gung-ho risk-takers or drivers and leaders only, but equally they don't want people who are just complete followers, who aren't prepared to do anything that's got a bit of fear in it. They're looking for collaborative people, team workers.

During the training we didn't have psychological testing as such, but psychologists were always on a training mission — they'd be watching us from mission control when we were in the simulators, always monitoring. If you're a bit more ratty with the rest of the crew than you might otherwise be, if you're not showing the tolerance that's required, if you can't be flexible in normal working relationships, that's not a very good quality to have. So they're just monitoring what we do. That's certainly the way the Russians did it — they were very much in the background, but always there.

I did feel very separate from the world, from the Earth, although I was with my crewmates. I launched on Soyuz with two others, and then we joined the space station and met two more up there, so once I got there after a couple of days there were five of us. It wasn't a tiny crew — but on the other hand it wasn't like going into a bar or a café and meeting up with all your friends. It's quite a strange existence in some respects, separate from the Earth and all the people down there. And yet we knew the teams directed to us through mission control would be very supportive. We had communication through our radio, and an amateur radio station, so I could talk to other people. It's that voice connection — somehow at one point you feel quite disconnected from the Earth, and yet keeping in contact with people gives you that understanding of what you're going to come back to in the end.

The other part of being away is that only a few people really understand what you're going through. My crewmates and I understood what was happening in space, but my friends and family on Earth couldn't really understand me. So within the crew we wanted to be very open — that had been reinforced in training, that we needed to keep open communications. If something was bothering us about the way somebody was behaving, we'd discuss it and not let it fester. If we got mad, we were advised to go to a part of the space station where we couldn't see anybody else, calm down, and then come back and discuss it. Open discussion, but with an understanding that you need to be really tolerant — more tolerant than perhaps you'd normally be on Earth. A lot of what we do doesn't really matter whether we did it this way or that way, but if it helps somebody else, that's cool. You learn what you really need to do and what really doesn't matter in the end.

The Earth is just tantalisingly attractive. As we orbit and come back to the same point in space, relative to the Earth the surface has moved around by about 23 degrees, so you get this constantly changing view. And it's beautiful. Is it beautiful because we've evolved on Earth? Is it beautiful because somehow we like that blue colour, that wavelength of light is just attractive to our eyes? Or is it beautiful because we have our loved ones back on Earth, and so we mix in our brains that love and beauty together? I don't know, but it is just gorgeous.

Somehow you don't get that vibrancy when you see a picture on a screen or on printed paper. It really feels as though the Earth is deep — the sea goes down a long way, the sunlight reflects off the top of the clouds back up to us in space, and it can be so bright it really hurts your eyes. You can't see individual people, but you can see the effects of people: long straight lines coming out of the back of ships, smoke from fires because it gets blown in a straight line, though you don't see the fire itself unless it's really big. And at night you see all the lights — that's when it becomes obvious where the big centres of population really are.

Everybody seems to think being in space is, like most things we hear about, constantly amazing and exciting — everybody playing games, doing a bit of experiments, having great fun all the time. Actually a lot of it is much more calm, natural and low-key. We spent a lot of our free time looking out of the window, sometimes not even talking — we'd just gather around the window and be together and enjoy that perspective. It's an amazing thing to do, to go into space, and I was only there for a few short days. But for the people who are there for six months, there's a lot of monotony — some days are very similar to other days. It's not all a highly exciting life, but that's not to say it's not enjoyable for the vast majority of the time. And astronauts get to do grotty jobs as well — somebody's got to clean out the toilet and wipe slime from the walls.

Not being a medic myself, I was just carrying out the experiments — it's the scientists on Earth who designed them. A lot of the medical stuff was about my adaptation to feeling weightless, and my crew's as well. I was taking mostly blood samples — pinpricks, I didn't actually have to take venous blood, thank goodness, that would have been a load more training. I'd then analyse them with an instrument we had on board, so I didn't have to bring the samples back to Earth. It was looking at loss of calcium from bone and potassium from muscle in that adaptation to weightlessness. There was one experiment looking at how I felt orientation — if I closed my eyes, could I feel a horizontal, an up and a down, and how did that work?

And other things, the general science, because I was doing a whole variety, which was the spice of life — it made it quite fun. I did experiments on plants and protein crystals. I was growing luciferase that I'd bring back to Earth, hopefully as much bigger and better-formed crystals than you can make on Earth, and new materials. A nice mixture.

Wow, the future of space travel. I think we'll certainly have much more commercial spaceflight. At the moment we talk about it being contracted to NASA, but SpaceX is now learning how it can, and Boeing as well — they're all understanding how to fly full space missions, land the spacecraft themselves, and build them. So I think these companies will start to take funds from people who aren't linked to space agencies at some point, and that will reduce the cost of space travel and increase access.

We're going to have to be careful that we don't get to the point where we're polluting — and I don't just mean the Earth's atmosphere, but also space. We've got a huge amount of space debris, and that's a big issue we're not really looking at properly yet. But longer term, yes, we're going to Mars — absolutely, we'll have people on the surface of Mars. And I think we'll have more and more space probes going to different parts of the solar system. I'm really looking forward to the return of a Japanese mission at the end of this year, where we'll learn more about the asteroid — this particular spacecraft has been to the asteroid Ryugu.

It will certainly become cheaper, and more people will therefore be able to afford it. How cheap, and how many people will be able to afford it and want to go — possibly for a very short time — is another question. I don't particularly want to, even if I had the money, go on some sort of suborbital up-and-down mission. But if I was given the opportunity to spend a few days in space and make that useful, do some experiments as well as enjoying the time up there, then I probably would. So I think it's going to be an interesting time. The bottom line is we've already got tourism, and it will only increase.

I think there are so many opportunities in this world. I always assumed, before I heard that advert, that going into space was impossible for somebody like me. We just don't know what's going to be around the corner, and the world is changing so rapidly. We've just got to be open to all the opportunities out there and not be scared of giving something a go. You might need to do a bit of weighing up of the risks versus the benefits, and you might want to have a backup plan — but some opportunities come our way only once, and sometimes you just have to take a chance.